TOKYO -- Seventy-seven percent of respondents to a weekend Mainichi Shimbun poll said that Shigeru Ishiba, the newly elected head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), should work to uncover the truth about party factions' secret slush funds, against just 15% who said there was no need to do so.

The LDP has punished 39 members involved in the scandal, including senior lawmakers who belonged to the faction previously led by the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. However, the true state of those funds and the sequence of events that led to their creation have not been clarified.

The Mainichi conducted the nationwide public opinion poll on Sept. 28 and 29 using a combination of mobile phone texts and automated voice calls to landlines. A total of 539 valid responses were received by mobile phone and 532 via landlines.

(Japanese original by Daisuke Nohara, Poll Office)